Cochlear implant surgery has grandfather rediscovering life

Friday

Oct 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMOct 30, 2009 at 10:54 AM

Mike Scheerer was sitting at his kitchen table, drinking his coffee - his regular morning ritual. But this particular morning, he kept hearing a "tick, tick, tick." "Do you hear that second hand?" Scheerer asks his guest. "I had never, ever heard that before." The soft click of his wall clock was the first distinct new sound Scheerer's brain picked out the morning after his new cochlear implant was turned on.

Jennifer Davis

Mike Scheerer was sitting at his kitchen table, drinking his coffee - his regular morning ritual. But this particular morning, he kept hearing a "tick, tick, tick."

"Do you hear that second hand?" Scheerer asks his guest. "I had never, ever heard that before."

The soft click of his wall clock was the first distinct new sound Scheerer's brain picked out the morning after his new cochlear implant was turned on.

"It took me awhile to figure out what it was." Scheerer walked around his apartment until he finally pinpointed the source.

And the birds. His face lights up when he mentions the birds.

"The birds singing. The birds and the trees. I would say that's the most beautiful thing I've heard. I never heard birds before - that I can remember. Maybe I heard them as a kid growing up."

Scheerer was born with cerebral palsy, but he believes it was the meningitis he contracted at age 6 that stole his hearing. Over the years, it deteriorated until about 30 years ago when it reached a point "that I couldn't hear anything without my hearing aid."

Even with the most powerful hearing aid available, Scheerer knows he missed a lot. "I would catch maybe two words of every sentence." To fill in the rest, he relied on reading lips. That's why he jumped at the chance last month to be the first patient to have cochlear implant surgery in Peoria. Previously, the closest implant program was in Champaign.

"I didn't know about them (cochlear implants) until five years ago. I wanted to have it done, but the distance was a problem for me, and I had heart troubles at the time."

On Sept. 15, Scheerer had a cochlear implant surgically placed in his right ear, his only good ear - making it a risk. On Oct. 13, after the swelling had subsided, doctors turned it on, and Scheerer's whole world changed.

"This is a God-given gift." He keeps repeating it. There are no better words.

As big a deal as this is for Scheerer, a 58-year-old father of three, grandfather of five, it's almost as big a deal to Peoria, says Dr. James Klemens, Scheerer's surgeon.

"It's not a small sort of thing to set up the program," said Scheerer, who has worked with OSF Saint Francis Medical Center for the past year to set this up. "This is never going to be a huge moneymaker. That's the reason that you can't just run off and start a cochlear implant program in a lot of places. You have to have people who are committed to doing it despite the fact that you are either going to break even or maybe even lose some money."

And St. Francis eagerly stepped up, Klemens says. In addition to buying the equipment, the hospital's audiologists had to be specially trained.

"Doing the procedure is kind of the easy part, quite frankly," says Klemens. "It's a complex sort of procedure, but it's still the easy part because you have to have the audiologists who do all the pre-operative testing to make sure the patient is a candidate. And then you have to train the audiologists on how to program the device. And the programming is a very complex process. And then, if you want to do things with children, it gets even more complex."

Cochlear implants are very different than hearing aids. Where hearing aids amplify sound, cochlear implants bypass the damaged portion of the ear and directly stimulate the auditory nerve. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, about 188,000 people worldwide have received implants as of April 2009.

"The people who need this surgery are people who are bilateral, both ears, severely or profoundly deaf," says Klemens. "Everybody knows somebody who can't hear and uses hearing aids. That person is not deaf. That person may have a moderate or even severe hearing loss, but if they can get by with hearing aids or without having to read lips, then they don't have severe or profound hearing loss to the point where they would benefit from a cochlear implant. If you have severe or profound hearing loss in one ear and not in your good ear, then you still would not benefit from a cochlear implant. Because the hearing in your good ear is never going to be able to be matched by the cochlear implant. So you have to have nothing better."

Scheerer was a good candidate.

"The hearing aid he had was the most powerful and even that wasn't working for him. His audiologist told him it was just a matter of time before he'd be completely deaf," says Brad Scheerer, one of his sons.

Doctors had to put the implant in Scheerer's one good ear because it was the only one that was still getting any stimulation. His left ear had been basically turned off for so long that an implant likely wouldn't have worked.

"You don't just flip this thing on and all of a sudden you can hear," says Klemens. "What happens is, you're used to using your entire cochlea, but this electrode only goes about halfway up. But the brain is absolutely amazing. It figures out and remaps where it's hearing. The brain compensates. The other thing that happens is that as he uses this longer, he'll get better at it. Over the course of several years even."

Simple conversations with his sons and grandchildren. His cat's meow. Scheerer is ecstatic. He can patiently wait for his next love: music. At some point, his implant will have to be programmed specifically for music.

"Deafness kept me in the dark about a lot of things," Scheerer said. "You can't imagine. I don't seek pity, just understanding and compassion. But this has made it possible for me to enjoy life much, much more."